


(you lived your life) like a candle in the wind

by elicitillicit



Series: Volte Face [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, F/M, everyone just needs a hug, so AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-18
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-11-23 18:34:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18155534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elicitillicit/pseuds/elicitillicit
Summary: Daphne notes that Cassius had died with his eyes half-closed in a squint, as if he’d been taken aback, but not afraid. He’d died too quickly to be afraid. There is still soil on his face, fanned under his eyelashes, grit under his fingernails.The metal of the tray bites into her palms as she leans over and tries to close his eyes. They won’t shut – of course they won’t – trust Cassius to be obstinate even in death – and so she gives up and kisses his forehead, feeling his body cooling. She kisses his nose, and then his lips, one last time.There is no need to speak. The dead do not listen in the same way as the living.OR:It's Cassius Warrington, Seventh-Year Slytherin, who was the spare in that graveyard.





	(you lived your life) like a candle in the wind

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter title is from Elton John's immortal tribute to Marilyn Monroe. 
> 
> TW-ish? for unconscious self-inflicted harm? Stop reading from "Ask his parents if they wanted his Slytherin Quidditch jumper, the one that he had lent her that one day at the lake because it was cold," and pick it up again at ""You aren’t dead yet,” she hisses, and Daphne thinks she might have nodded."

_your candle burned out long before  
your legend ever did _

_\- Candle in the Wind, by Elton John_

_._

_._

_._

Daphne remembers the day of the third task of the Triwizard Tournament in stages.

 

.

.

.

In the morning, she's angry at Cassius, and it takes everything she has to be reasonable about it. He’d told her that he’d be ready to meet her at half-past seven so that they could have one last walk about the lake – and so she could give him his good-luck charm, but he didn’t know about that just yet. He’d been out drinking sneaky swigs of firewhisky with the other upper-year Slytherins until close to dawn, and hadn’t made it for their rendezvous.

Daphne waits half an hour in the Slytherin Common Room before snagging a spare piece of parchment from Pansy, scrawling  _WARRINGTON_ on it, and savagely pinning the charm – an old family pin with a drop of felix felicis encased in crystal in place of a gemstone – through the middle of his name. She sticks it smack in the middle of the window out into the lake, where no one walking by the Common Room could miss it.

Then she scowls through breakfast and only half-heartedly listens to Pansy moan about Malfoy being the class-A prick that he is. When Cassius finally stumbles into the Great Hall, disheveled and frantic, Daphne stands, resolutely ignoring him as he hurries down the Slytherin table, and sweeps out of the Hall through one of its side corridors. It feels good.

She will regret it.

.

.

.

Cassius catches up to her after her double Transfiguration period, flustered, hungover, and with her good-luck charm pinned to his collar. “I’ve no excuse for this morning,” he blurts out, without preamble. “I’m sorry, and it will never, ever happen again.”

She's still petty enough to be miffed, and so she steps away from him and folds her arms. “The drinking, or how you stood me up?” 

Cassius reaches for her again – gently, seriously. “I will never miss another moment that I have to see you, Daph. I was careless. I hurt you.”

He really is very persuasive, and Daphne is fifteen and in love. So, she tilts her head up and kisses the corner of his mouth, feeling it lift in a smile. Cassius rarely smiles, and every single one is a gift.

.

.

. 

She is the last of his party to leave his side before he joins the other competitors, and is wracked by a sudden rush of bad, bad feeling.

“Please, be safe,” she whispers. She notes, absently, that she is cataloguing the exact black of his eyes, the faint burst of freckles across his cheeks. The way his eyebrows beetle and draw together in concentration.

The way he is looking at her, soft and generous, when Cassius Warrington isn't one to be  _sweet_ , and always has his armour closed tight around him like a fist.

Cassius kisses her: once on the mouth, once on the nose, and once at the top of her forehead, against her hairline. She feels a knot in her chest unravel. She feels like sunlight is blooming from the space between her lungs and her diaphragm. She feels more with Cassius Warrington than she has ever let herself feel.  

“I’ll come back, Daph. I love you. I’ll love you for the rest of my life.”

She doesn’t know  _why_ he says that, because they are only teenagers, and even  _she_  knows that it is dangerous to promise people  _love_  for the duration of forever.

Still, she breathes in the moment, smoothes the pin on his collar, and tells him that she will be waiting.

.

.

.

The Triwizard Tournament is brutal, and unkind, and unnecessary. She spends the majority of those four hours glued to her seat, frantic and livid and  _what is that spider_  and  _Merlin,_ could Harry Potter  _be_ any nobler?

But Daphne knows Cassius – knows how fiercely he hated being in the debt of  _anyone_  – and so she is not surprised that he offers to heft the cup with Potter. Together.

Then they disappear, and Daphne loses track of time.

. 

.

. 

Pansy brings her to Mr and Mrs Warrington, and then stays, because it's obvious that Cassius had not inherited his quiet sense self-possession from either of his parents.

Mr Warrington paces and rages at an assortment of ministry men gathered outside the entrance of the maze, now flattened to nubs of ankle-height footpath shrubbery. Mrs Warrington had thrown herself onto a settee conjured from the nearest hedge and begun wailing, screaming about her only child.

Daphne huddles, frozen, in Astoria’s arms as Pansy stations herself in front of them, glaring at anyone who tries to approach, pugnacious and rude about it. 

Snakes huddle together to keep warm.

And then Harry Potter comes whooshing back, dragging Cassius Warrington’s corpse along with him.

Daphne sinks to the ground in a tearless, graceless heap. Somewhere, she hears someone shout  _watch out for Greengrass!_ as the entire wizarding world thunders towards Harry Potter and the dead boy he’s brought back.

She doesn’t know how she ends up sitting in a quiet classroom, Cassius laid out on a metal tray before her. She hadn’t known what  _death_  meant until she perches on the edge of that tray, and tries to hold his cold, cold hand, clawed in rigour mortis (If she closed her eyes, it almost felt like he is holding her hand back). The good luck charm she’d given him is still pinned to his collar, but the crystal is smashed, the drop of luck, gone.

The Warringtons, in respect for their relationship, are waiting outside for her to say her goodbyes before they went in. She understands what those scant minutes of solitude cost them.  

Daphne notes that Cassius had died with his eyes half-closed in a squint, as if he’d been taken aback, but not afraid. He’d died too quickly to be afraid. There is still soil on his face, fanned under his eyelashes, grit under his fingernails.

The metal of the tray bites into her palms as she leans over and tries to close his eyes. They won’t shut – of course they won’t – trust Cassius to be obstinate even in death – and so she gives up and kisses his forehead, feeling his body cooling. She kisses his nose, and then his lips, one last time.

There is no need to speak. The dead do not listen in the same way as the living.

Daphne kisses the body that once held the boy she loved, and leaves the room that houses it. Mrs Warrington shoves past her the moment the door opens, but Daphne ignores it in the wake of the woman’s grief.  _My child_ , she shrieks.  _My boy._

Mr Warrington, aged beyond his years, beyond the years Cassius would never have, kneels at his seventeen-year-old son’s feet, whispering:  _my baby_.

Astoria and Pansy tuck her into their embrace, and the door to Cassius’s temporary mausoleum swings closed.

Pansy bundles her, grass-stained robes and all, into the shower while Astoria floo’es their parents. She sits under that warm spray while her best friend gently peels layer after layer of wet clothing off her, thinking about all the things she would have to do now that he is gone. She would have to help plan his memorial amongst his friends. Sort out the gifts that he had given her over the course of their year-long relationship. Ask his parents if they wanted his Slytherin Quidditch jumper, the one that he had lent her that one day at the lake because it was cold.

And, because Daphne is a sensible girl, she knows that this is shock, and it hasn’t quite yet sunk in that Cassius Warrington is dead. Not yet. She isn’t even sure if she is crying, or if it's just the water from the shower head streaming down her face, getting into her eyes, closing off her airways. Is the room spinning?

Pansy yanks her away from the stream of water, cursing, when she realises that Daphne has yet to shift her head from under the shower head to take a breath. 

“You aren’t dead yet,” she hisses, and Daphne thinks she might have nodded. Pansy tilts her head back again more carefully under the water, and Daphne knows that her friend’s hands are shaking as they comb through her wet hair.

Astoria and Pansy curl up on either side of her, that night, whispering that her mother would be coming to Hogwarts tomorrow, and everything would be  _okay, okay, okay_. Daphne wonders, idly, when it was that it stopped feeling like her mother could make every hurt sting less.

Pansy had begged a sleeping draught from Madam Pomfrey, and Daphne throws it back like a shot.

It's a mistake.

It storms, that night: so loud and so angry that they can hear the wind whipping the lake into a frenzy even in the dungeons. Daphne struggles under the potion’s weight, listening to the storm, dreaming of the Quidditch stands and the trampled grass.

Every clap of thunder is Cassius Warrington hitting the dirt.

When Daphne finally blinks herself awake, heavy and thick from the potion, she finds herself lying on her side, her head on her sister’s lap and Astoria’s nightdress soaked through with a combination of mucus and salt water. Pansy is clutching a pillow on the other side of the bed, muffling her own sobs into it. (Pansy had known Cassius too.)

“You were crying in your sleep,” Astoria chokes, swiping a small thumb across Daphne’s cheekbones. “I thought you were going to suffocate. I thought you were going to die. I thought I was too late and you were dead.”

 _No,_ Daphne says, or thinks she says. “Just Cassius.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've wanted to write this fic for a long, long time (if you were with me on tumblr back in 2015/2016, you'd remember the handful of little drabbles set in this universe), but I feel that I've only been able to do the emotional aspect of it justice only recently. There isn't a set timeline for updates, and I know that I'm notoriously awful at updating (ref: Left Hook, which was started in 2015), but because this story is deeply personal to me, I don't want to rush the storytelling. 
> 
> Separately: I have a headcanon where the use of dreamless sleep potions are heavily regulated due to propensity for abuse, so Madam Pomfrey is NOT going to just be handing it out to teenagers, no matter how traumatised they are.

**Author's Note:**

> I've wanted to write this fic for a long, long time (if you were with me on tumblr back in 2015/2016, you'd remember the handful of little drabbles set in this universe), but I feel that I've only been able to do the emotional aspect of it justice only recently. There isn't a set timeline for updates, and I know that I'm notoriously awful at updating (ref: Left Hook, which was started in 2015), but because this story is deeply personal to me, I don't want to rush the storytelling.
> 
> Separately: I have a headcanon where the use of dreamless sleep potions are heavily regulated due to propensity for abuse, so Madam Pomfrey is NOT going to just be handing it out to teenagers, no matter how traumatised they are.
> 
>  
> 
> Come find me on tumblr (if anyone still uses tumblr) at pureblxxds for anything HP related, or at elicitillicit, where I am moving through my own narrative.


End file.
